The other day one of my coworkers asked me if I knew anything about probiotics. I told her that I knew just about everything I wanted to know about them, fearing that I was going to be led into another conversation about fecal transplants and/or my most hated and feared food, sauerkraut. Instead…

A few years ago when Jackson was playing youth league basketball, he jammed his finger pretty badly and we ended up at the ER, and then we were referred to a hand specialist because it was a weird break. The bone at the tip of his finger had actually split, like if you took an ax to a log. There’s a name for that type of break but I Google image searched and couldn’t find an example, and now I’ve creased my brain with so many truly horrendous hand injuries and I’m not even done with my first cup of coffee.

I know that many of my fellow and sister white folks who live in the United States annually take some time to reflect on both the origins and the consequences of the first Thanksgiving, as I do. I am not thankful for that first boatload of Europeans, though my ancestors were among those that took advantage of the blood-soaked ground they left for others to build upon. Only a psychopath (which I am mostly not) would miss the paradox of celebrating such a terrible legacy.

I’ve been going through my drafts folder and inadvertently publishing ten-year-old posts about caulk and LeBron James, which is kind of a funny glimpse back into the mind of the person I still, basically, am. I saved the title of this post on September 19, 2007, and “whatever makes you different makes you pretty” was probably a notion that struck me while I was doing the dishes or photographing action figures pretending to talk about Downton Abbey.